No UHD here, yet, but I'm hoping. Cable TV in my area has been in suspended animation for well over a year with Adelphia in bankruptcy and the Time-Warner/Comcast deals in regulatory limbo. Nobody wanted to make decisions or commit to deals that might be overturned by the new regime, so everyone's just concentrated on maintaining the existing service, not improving or adding to it. With the Comcast deal now in place I hope we may see some new channels, some better options in DVR features and maybe the DVRs and associated service itself (Comcast on the west coast offers an HD DVR that is much closer to TiVO than the clunky stuff I'm working with, while Adelphia didn't even offer the home-neworking and program sharing features that the Scientific Atanta boxes they do provide can handle, because they couldn't pay for the software upgrade while in bankruptcy.)
But I doubt any of this will happen until after
Firefly wraps its HD run on UHD. I guess I'll just have to settle for the DVDs upconverted on my HD set in the meantime. (Assuming I get far enough in work on this place to unpack the box that those discs are currently stored in.)
OT, but speaking of how SD DVDs can look on a properly-adjusted HD set - I just spent the last week watching a series of recently restored classic films on my system, including 3 early Technicolor features, and they all look
stunning on my gear.
This was actually the first time I had ever sat down and watched
Gone with the Wind from beginning to end. I've seen the same bits and pieces of the film over and over throughout the years, but not in context or in order. In many ways it was not the film I expected.
For one thing I had no idea how much of the action took place
after the end of the war. I'm still not entirely sure what I think of it. It is a huge, sprawling soap opera, that's for sure, and the 1930s depection of 19th century slavery and the treatment of the slave characters were cringe-inducing, to say the least. And I was surprised to realize that far from merely being a spoiled, silly rich girl, Scarlett O'Hara was really a selfish, evil bitch.
But man did she (and the film) ever look gorgeous. My first thought was that I should lend my 4-disc set to some friends and relatives who would appreciate the restored version on DVD - but then I realized not one of them had a TV capable of showing detail I was seeing even if I
were given half an hour to properly calibrate it.
The Wizard of Oz and
The Adventtures of Robin Hood rounded out my Technicolor review. The other films in my recent "all classics" round-up were
Citizen Kane, The Maltese Falcon and the first two (which is to say, the
only)
Godfather films.
Regards,
Joe
